Stockholders aboard the good ship “Queen of the Capitalist West” appear to be experiencing a “shiver me timbers” moment. The portentous stockholders aboard the “Queen of the Capitalist West” had come to believe that it was their divine right to assume that only they had the right to dictate who could have skin in the global trading game. But lo and behold, along came a potentially ‘world shaking’ event with the arrival of the good ship “Mandate of Heaven,” a Chinese trading vessel of exceptional stature, whose enterprise was born of state capitalism’s heroic effort to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
As sailing ships navigated passages atop the sometimes-tumultuous oceans of previous eras, sailors were exposed to forces that arose from subterranean places to assert their presence in unforeseen ways. In heavy seas, ships would be lifted and pounded down so hard as to ‘shiver’ the timbers of the vessel’s infrastructure, which frequently spread fear among the crew. When the good ship “Mandate of Heaven” crossed the path of the good ship “Queen of the West” the stage was set for disputes concerning rules that might help govern the multilateral waterways belonging to King Neptune. It was as though the good ship “Mandate of Heaven” had separated itself from its astral moorings in order to participate in the recovery of China. Its very appearance signaled coexistence.
It was this event, the awakening of the Dragon and the arrival of the good ship “Mandate of Heaven” that sent shock waves through the crew on the “Queen of the West.” For centuries, European colonial traders had plied their trade piratically across the globe, their eyes and songs adapting to the hues of their aquatic home, with scant regard for the centuries of trade previously conducted by mighty maritime fleets plying the waters of the South China Sea and elsewhere.
Whilst the Dragon lay inert, seemingly lacking the ability or strength to move, the expansionist West, believing that the world was its oyster, salivated over the possibility of harnessing this great nation to the Western bandwagon. But history, like water, had a way of finding its own level and the Dragon proved it was too big to fit into anyone’s cage. Clearly, the interests of the West’s colonial procurement culture under capitalism could no longer expect carte blanche in Asian affairs since the Dragon had acquired its second wind in no small measure.
The Dragon had been exposed to a score of vapid colonial intruders but refused to forfeit any of its essence. The “Heavenly Mandate was no longer on life support, it rose up like a phoenix from the ashes of history and found its revolutionary spirit once again to deal with problems associated with the West’s decaying world order. While Western banking was afflicted with recurring recessions, China’s central planners kept the ship of state on an even keel by steadfastly expanding its manufacturing base. In doing so, it became a great trading nation once again and, not surprisingly, aroused the ire of the West when it realized how formidable a competitor it had to deal with.
Meanwhile in the West, banks, apart from printing currency, set about conspiring to concoct narratives that attempted to make democratic capitalism more palatable to the public. The age of fake had arrived. As privately controlled entities, the banks operated to serve the interests of their stockholders rather than acting in the public interest. With the introduction of austerity, the case for democratic capitalism lost its attraction when whole societies began to realise that they were subjected to belt-tightening measures by those who profited from chaos. The public took notice of how elites… who had taken over the show… engorged themselves while the generality of people experienced depredation. It was at this point that cracks began appearing in the democratic narrative… so many illusions and so little substance… was there a better way…?
The spectacle of so many bankers and stakeholders dancing around the money tree to shake whatever they could from it, gave rise to the ‘yellow vests’ revolt in France. Austerity as ‘medicine’ designed to reinvigorate the economic system was seen for what it was, a hoax. Despite all promotional efforts, it came to be seen for the deception it was, a Washington Consensus money-laundering business creating its own market of stricken customers so that money could be made from the medicine that it proffered to them. Per medium of a privatised media and vainglorious propaganda, a worn-out narrative justifying a reality that apportioned the tip of the iceberg to the 99%, whilst the bulk of the berg going to the 1%, came to epitomise late capitalism’s actions as paucity and plenitude doing the danse macabre as the ship of state floundered.
In our hemisphere, the good ship “Queen of the West,’ flying the flag of the neocon market-state has delivered austerity and gross inequality in regions under its control and hopes to apply this inhumane practice globally. But to its great chagrin, the good ship “Mandate of Heaven” crossed its path flying the flag of the Peoples Republic of China, thus sending a moral shiver throughout the length and breadth of the unconscionable timbers of the ‘good’ ship “Queen of the West.” Inevitable, the shivers would translate into a trade war.
The bosun of the “Queen of the West”… the officer in charge of equipment and crew… a man called Trump, achieved his reputation as pirate-in-chief aboard the not-so-good ship “The Apprentice”… and is said to be master of the demonic deal. He is a true pirate who believes that the loud of mouth shall inherit the earth. But what he fails to grasp is that Confucius’s genius was in creating the concept of collective existentialism as a mandate for development and reflection for the people who constituted the nation of China… so, how will Trump ‘deal’ with that… it’s not the same as negotiating a deal to buy a piece of real estate in Manhattan?
Once piracy became the accepted norm in the West, securitisation of procurements had to follow. Intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI in the USA, M15 in the UK, Mossad in Israel, etc., etc. came into existence to procure protection from competitors who might out-industrialise them, out-revolutionise them, out-develop them, or simply evolve beyond the mores of Old Testament patrimony by creating an ethical code that might go universal. In the capitalist West, it has become de rigueur to vilify methods fostering greater social cohesion as mob rule. Socialism had become a dirty word. Strangest of all was the fact that the myth of America as the can-do people seemed incapable of expressing anything but mean-spiritedness when it came to the subject of Russian or Chinese development. Had American mythology, upon becoming uniquely unique, begun to disappear up its own unique arse?
With the proliferation of agencies presenting themselves as the putative representations of the ‘free society’, the hoodwinked public might soon awaken to the fact that they are yet again being marinated in another version of a military narrative that supports that very self-serving industry. Evidently, the show is clandestine to the marrow and laced with American megalomania and best left to Dick Cheney who is on record as saying, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities.” Cheney may well be right of course, the people may judiciously take all this in their stride; then again, they may not.
But what Dick omitted to say was, “When we create these new realities, they must out of necessity remain secret. If anyone seeks to examine the documentation that records our activities, they will find them heavily redacted, because we’re an empire now and are answerable to no one by virtue of our ability to manufacture new realities… take the ‘red scare’ episode as a demonization tactic… surely one of the empire’s more successful propaganda coups. It managed to coerce the EU into accepting NATO into its aegis-amora in matters of alliance.
In our war against the Russian Federation, the USA succeeded in out manoeuvring the European colonizers and beating them at their own game by effectively outwitting those past-masters of resource extraction by dint of the kudos that came with the stars-and-stripes and the hardware that supported our intentions. A proclivity for procuring evermore skin in the game… the global game… was such, that no competitor could imagine that the USA would ever give any ground or forfeit its desire for a global Empire. We will colonize the lot of them, even if it requires replacing the stars and stripes with the skull and crossbones.”
There is no doubt that pirates have long been running the ‘show’ in the West. The paths taken by venal European entrepreneurs have been diverse to say the least. But we can be sure of one thing, they unequivocally led toward the coveted resources that existed in many exotic places across the globe where ethnically existentialist societies existed to form alliances with nature and become part of the natural cycle that regulated bounty in an agrarian way. These were the people who were blissfully unaware of the fact that zinc, copper, oil, coal were part and parcel of their provenance. They were blissfully unaware too that there were people like Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, etc. out there in the world, who would come to ‘pacify’ them in an all too familiar way and pirate their resources for the purpose of procuring ever more booty for themselves. The myth of the secondary had to prevail!
But, as we should know, but don’t, the historic record is but a conflation of things that reinforce the myth that the West is the civilising force par excellence. What we fail to notice is that historians in general… with few exceptions… have always been lackeys who perpetrated the myth of exceptionalism by protecting the status quo from the prying eyes of microscopic examination. In behaving in this way, they effectively dispatched honour to the ingloriously nether regions of the establishment crotch to do what journalists and historians now seem to do best, engage in deception and obsequious reporting so that they can continue to serve the status quo.
The history of mercantile trade consisted of myriad forays by diverse groups into exotic locations to promote trade. The usual practice was to visit a port or dock alongside a location that facilitated trade. When trading was completed, the visitors would depart. But unlike the Chinese traders who visited these exotic destinations to procure commercial gains before leaving, the European traders sought to procure the territory itself by using gunboats and blandishments to justify their stay and occupation.
What transpired was the emergence of two aspects of the same evil: piracy in the form of state sanctioned piracy… the Union Jack being the more prominent emblem adorning the good ship “HMS Civilisation” that had arrived to impose Anglophilism on the less than civilised natives who were unaware of Britain’s self-anointed superiority. At the vanguard of a motley band of robber barons from various quarters of Europe, it was “HMS Civilisation,” accompanied by two gunboats that stole the show. Their justification for ‘permanent status’ was that they were bringing civilisation to the region, whilst their competitors were merely interested in matters pecuniary. In time, this piece of chicanery… playing the civilisation card… would malevolently corrupt the historic ledger and allow misinformation to spill from the pen of historians.
To wit: craft and craftiness, and the similarities between Trump’s efforts to curb the development of China… deny oxygen to the Dragon and to Russia as an example of how the West extols ‘civilised’ power. The existence of a parallelism connecting the activities of a secret cabal of very rich and powerful men in London who plotted the destruction of Germany in the years leading up to the first world war is now coming into our purview. But to understand what is happening we need to take note of the fact that we cannot believe in the historic record anymore… we can only question it. The official history of the West is about who acquired what and when, and who was knighted and who was left benighted.
In 1891 a secret society comprising members of the English class was formed in London with the long-term goal of taking control of the world. Two essential components of their shared approach were secrecy and an understanding that the reality of power was much more important than the appearance of power. In the early years, the leading activists were Cecil Rhodes, William Stead, Lord Esher, Alfred Milner and Lord Nathaniel Rothschild. Renewal and strengthening of the bond between Britain and the United States of America was a central plank of Secret Elite policy.
The opening decade of the 19th. century saw Germany emerge as a serious challenger to British manufacture. Designing a more efficient mercantile fleet powered by oil rather than coal was only one feature among many that sent shivers through the timbers of the British establishment. What really occurred within this epoch is most professionally dissected by two Scottish historians in their masterfully researched book, “Hidden History: The Secret Origins Of The First World War” by Gerry Docherty & Jim Macgregor, who so ably address the question…nay allegation, that Germany, and Germany alone was the aggressor, is dismissed as a coup that had dreadful consequences. The meaningless loss of millions of lives being the central plank. The labeling of Germany as ‘warmonger’ by Britain and its allies was unmistakably an exercise in character assignation and would be used again a hundred years later in the West against China and Russia.
As is the case with President Donald Trump and his adjutants who seek to “Make America Great Again,” a similar group of cohorts gathered out of sight of parliament and the media in Britain in the last decade of the 18th century and the 1st decade of the 19th century to advance the interests of the super-rich, while purportedly championing the virtues of British civilisation and freedom. What connects the deep state of that earlier period with our current one is privilege and inherited wealth. The colonial ‘titaholics’ who spread across the globe applying their fleshy lips to nature’s bountiful bosom… to suck oil from the Middle East, extract minerals from Africa (whilst enslaving its people) were after each and every ‘titbit’ they could extract from the myriad places they ‘visited’… to stay and achieve what they needed to do… transfer their ill-gotten gains into a vast investment portfolio that would ultimately define ‘greatness’ in an insidiously Anglophile way.
It appears that the more the history of privilege and inherited wealth in the capitalist West changes, the more it stays the same. One hundred years ago Lord ‘Natty’ Rothschild was observed inspecting the pound sterling note to find if it contained the ‘skull and bones’ watermark of authenticity.
In conclusion, one is left wondering if the governor of the Federal Reserve System, or ‘Natty’s’ descendants might repeat this practice with the Petro-dollar. If they did, they would discover the presence of two watermarks, instead of one, etched into that much fingered strip of oily lucre known as the Petro-dollar. If they looked closely, they might observe ‘Skull and Crossbones’ etched into the left of the note, and the ‘Star of David’ etched to the right.
Denis A. Conroy is a freelance writer residing in Australia.
RSS
‘Skin in the game’
Posted on September 10, 2019 by Denis A. Conroy
Stockholders aboard the good ship “Queen of the Capitalist West” appear to be experiencing a “shiver me timbers” moment. The portentous stockholders aboard the “Queen of the Capitalist West” had come to believe that it was their divine right to assume that only they had the right to dictate who could have skin in the global trading game. But lo and behold, along came a potentially ‘world shaking’ event with the arrival of the good ship “Mandate of Heaven,” a Chinese trading vessel of exceptional stature, whose enterprise was born of state capitalism’s heroic effort to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
As sailing ships navigated passages atop the sometimes-tumultuous oceans of previous eras, sailors were exposed to forces that arose from subterranean places to assert their presence in unforeseen ways. In heavy seas, ships would be lifted and pounded down so hard as to ‘shiver’ the timbers of the vessel’s infrastructure, which frequently spread fear among the crew. When the good ship “Mandate of Heaven” crossed the path of the good ship “Queen of the West” the stage was set for disputes concerning rules that might help govern the multilateral waterways belonging to King Neptune. It was as though the good ship “Mandate of Heaven” had separated itself from its astral moorings in order to participate in the recovery of China. Its very appearance signaled coexistence.
It was this event, the awakening of the Dragon and the arrival of the good ship “Mandate of Heaven” that sent shock waves through the crew on the “Queen of the West.” For centuries, European colonial traders had plied their trade piratically across the globe, their eyes and songs adapting to the hues of their aquatic home, with scant regard for the centuries of trade previously conducted by mighty maritime fleets plying the waters of the South China Sea and elsewhere.
Whilst the Dragon lay inert, seemingly lacking the ability or strength to move, the expansionist West, believing that the world was its oyster, salivated over the possibility of harnessing this great nation to the Western bandwagon. But history, like water, had a way of finding its own level and the Dragon proved it was too big to fit into anyone’s cage. Clearly, the interests of the West’s colonial procurement culture under capitalism could no longer expect carte blanche in Asian affairs since the Dragon had acquired its second wind in no small measure.
The Dragon had been exposed to a score of vapid colonial intruders but refused to forfeit any of its essence. The “Heavenly Mandate was no longer on life support, it rose up like a phoenix from the ashes of history and found its revolutionary spirit once again to deal with problems associated with the West’s decaying world order. While Western banking was afflicted with recurring recessions, China’s central planners kept the ship of state on an even keel by steadfastly expanding its manufacturing base. In doing so, it became a great trading nation once again and, not surprisingly, aroused the ire of the West when it realized how formidable a competitor it had to deal with.
Meanwhile in the West, banks, apart from printing currency, set about conspiring to concoct narratives that attempted to make democratic capitalism more palatable to the public. The age of fake had arrived. As privately controlled entities, the banks operated to serve the interests of their stockholders rather than acting in the public interest. With the introduction of austerity, the case for democratic capitalism lost its attraction when whole societies began to realise that they were subjected to belt-tightening measures by those who profited from chaos. The public took notice of how elites… who had taken over the show… engorged themselves while the generality of people experienced depredation. It was at this point that cracks began appearing in the democratic narrative… so many illusions and so little substance… was there a better way…?
The spectacle of so many bankers and stakeholders dancing around the money tree to shake whatever they could from it, gave rise to the ‘yellow vests’ revolt in France. Austerity as ‘medicine’ designed to reinvigorate the economic system was seen for what it was, a hoax. Despite all promotional efforts, it came to be seen for the deception it was, a Washington Consensus money-laundering business creating its own market of stricken customers so that money could be made from the medicine that it proffered to them. Per medium of a privatised media and vainglorious propaganda, a worn-out narrative justifying a reality that apportioned the tip of the iceberg to the 99%, whilst the bulk of the berg going to the 1%, came to epitomise late capitalism’s actions as paucity and plenitude doing the danse macabre as the ship of state floundered.
In our hemisphere, the good ship “Queen of the West,’ flying the flag of the neocon market-state has delivered austerity and gross inequality in regions under its control and hopes to apply this inhumane practice globally. But to its great chagrin, the good ship “Mandate of Heaven” crossed its path flying the flag of the Peoples Republic of China, thus sending a moral shiver throughout the length and breadth of the unconscionable timbers of the ‘good’ ship “Queen of the West.” Inevitable, the shivers would translate into a trade war.
The bosun of the “Queen of the West”… the officer in charge of equipment and crew… a man called Trump, achieved his reputation as pirate-in-chief aboard the not-so-good ship “The Apprentice”… and is said to be master of the demonic deal. He is a true pirate who believes that the loud of mouth shall inherit the earth. But what he fails to grasp is that Confucius’s genius was in creating the concept of collective existentialism as a mandate for development and reflection for the people who constituted the nation of China… so, how will Trump ‘deal’ with that… it’s not the same as negotiating a deal to buy a piece of real estate in Manhattan?
Once piracy became the accepted norm in the West, securitisation of procurements had to follow. Intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI in the USA, M15 in the UK, Mossad in Israel, etc., etc. came into existence to procure protection from competitors who might out-industrialise them, out-revolutionise them, out-develop them, or simply evolve beyond the mores of Old Testament patrimony by creating an ethical code that might go universal. In the capitalist West, it has become de rigueur to vilify methods fostering greater social cohesion as mob rule. Socialism had become a dirty word. Strangest of all was the fact that the myth of America as the can-do people seemed incapable of expressing anything but mean-spiritedness when it came to the subject of Russian or Chinese development. Had American mythology, upon becoming uniquely unique, begun to disappear up its own unique arse?
With the proliferation of agencies presenting themselves as the putative representations of the ‘free society’, the hoodwinked public might soon awaken to the fact that they are yet again being marinated in another version of a military narrative that supports that very self-serving industry. Evidently, the show is clandestine to the marrow and laced with American megalomania and best left to Dick Cheney who is on record as saying, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities.” Cheney may well be right of course, the people may judiciously take all this in their stride; then again, they may not.
But what Dick omitted to say was, “When we create these new realities, they must out of necessity remain secret. If anyone seeks to examine the documentation that records our activities, they will find them heavily redacted, because we’re an empire now and are answerable to no one by virtue of our ability to manufacture new realities… take the ‘red scare’ episode as a demonization tactic… surely one of the empire’s more successful propaganda coups. It managed to coerce the EU into accepting NATO into its aegis-amora in matters of alliance.
In our war against the Russian Federation, the USA succeeded in out manoeuvring the European colonizers and beating them at their own game by effectively outwitting those past-masters of resource extraction by dint of the kudos that came with the stars-and-stripes and the hardware that supported our intentions. A proclivity for procuring evermore skin in the game… the global game… was such, that no competitor could imagine that the USA would ever give any ground or forfeit its desire for a global Empire. We will colonize the lot of them, even if it requires replacing the stars and stripes with the skull and crossbones.”
There is no doubt that pirates have long been running the ‘show’ in the West. The paths taken by venal European entrepreneurs have been diverse to say the least. But we can be sure of one thing, they unequivocally led toward the coveted resources that existed in many exotic places across the globe where ethnically existentialist societies existed to form alliances with nature and become part of the natural cycle that regulated bounty in an agrarian way. These were the people who were blissfully unaware of the fact that zinc, copper, oil, coal were part and parcel of their provenance. They were blissfully unaware too that there were people like Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, etc. out there in the world, who would come to ‘pacify’ them in an all too familiar way and pirate their resources for the purpose of procuring ever more booty for themselves. The myth of the secondary had to prevail!
But, as we should know, but don’t, the historic record is but a conflation of things that reinforce the myth that the West is the civilising force par excellence. What we fail to notice is that historians in general… with few exceptions… have always been lackeys who perpetrated the myth of exceptionalism by protecting the status quo from the prying eyes of microscopic examination. In behaving in this way, they effectively dispatched honour to the ingloriously nether regions of the establishment crotch to do what journalists and historians now seem to do best, engage in deception and obsequious reporting so that they can continue to serve the status quo.
The history of mercantile trade consisted of myriad forays by diverse groups into exotic locations to promote trade. The usual practice was to visit a port or dock alongside a location that facilitated trade. When trading was completed, the visitors would depart. But unlike the Chinese traders who visited these exotic destinations to procure commercial gains before leaving, the European traders sought to procure the territory itself by using gunboats and blandishments to justify their stay and occupation.
What transpired was the emergence of two aspects of the same evil: piracy in the form of state sanctioned piracy… the Union Jack being the more prominent emblem adorning the good ship “HMS Civilisation” that had arrived to impose Anglophilism on the less than civilised natives who were unaware of Britain’s self-anointed superiority. At the vanguard of a motley band of robber barons from various quarters of Europe, it was “HMS Civilisation,” accompanied by two gunboats that stole the show. Their justification for ‘permanent status’ was that they were bringing civilisation to the region, whilst their competitors were merely interested in matters pecuniary. In time, this piece of chicanery… playing the civilisation card… would malevolently corrupt the historic ledger and allow misinformation to spill from the pen of historians.
To wit: craft and craftiness, and the similarities between Trump’s efforts to curb the development of China… deny oxygen to the Dragon and to Russia as an example of how the West extols ‘civilised’ power. The existence of a parallelism connecting the activities of a secret cabal of very rich and powerful men in London who plotted the destruction of Germany in the years leading up to the first world war is now coming into our purview. But to understand what is happening we need to take note of the fact that we cannot believe in the historic record anymore… we can only question it. The official history of the West is about who acquired what and when, and who was knighted and who was left benighted.
In 1891 a secret society comprising members of the English class was formed in London with the long-term goal of taking control of the world. Two essential components of their shared approach were secrecy and an understanding that the reality of power was much more important than the appearance of power. In the early years, the leading activists were Cecil Rhodes, William Stead, Lord Esher, Alfred Milner and Lord Nathaniel Rothschild. Renewal and strengthening of the bond between Britain and the United States of America was a central plank of Secret Elite policy.
The opening decade of the 19th. century saw Germany emerge as a serious challenger to British manufacture. Designing a more efficient mercantile fleet powered by oil rather than coal was only one feature among many that sent shivers through the timbers of the British establishment. What really occurred within this epoch is most professionally dissected by two Scottish historians in their masterfully researched book, “Hidden History: The Secret Origins Of The First World War” by Gerry Docherty & Jim Macgregor, who so ably address the question…nay allegation, that Germany, and Germany alone was the aggressor, is dismissed as a coup that had dreadful consequences. The meaningless loss of millions of lives being the central plank. The labeling of Germany as ‘warmonger’ by Britain and its allies was unmistakably an exercise in character assignation and would be used again a hundred years later in the West against China and Russia.
As is the case with President Donald Trump and his adjutants who seek to “Make America Great Again,” a similar group of cohorts gathered out of sight of parliament and the media in Britain in the last decade of the 18th century and the 1st decade of the 19th century to advance the interests of the super-rich, while purportedly championing the virtues of British civilisation and freedom. What connects the deep state of that earlier period with our current one is privilege and inherited wealth. The colonial ‘titaholics’ who spread across the globe applying their fleshy lips to nature’s bountiful bosom… to suck oil from the Middle East, extract minerals from Africa (whilst enslaving its people) were after each and every ‘titbit’ they could extract from the myriad places they ‘visited’… to stay and achieve what they needed to do… transfer their ill-gotten gains into a vast investment portfolio that would ultimately define ‘greatness’ in an insidiously Anglophile way.
It appears that the more the history of privilege and inherited wealth in the capitalist West changes, the more it stays the same. One hundred years ago Lord ‘Natty’ Rothschild was observed inspecting the pound sterling note to find if it contained the ‘skull and bones’ watermark of authenticity.
In conclusion, one is left wondering if the governor of the Federal Reserve System, or ‘Natty’s’ descendants might repeat this practice with the Petro-dollar. If they did, they would discover the presence of two watermarks, instead of one, etched into that much fingered strip of oily lucre known as the Petro-dollar. If they looked closely, they might observe ‘Skull and Crossbones’ etched into the left of the note, and the ‘Star of David’ etched to the right.
Denis A. Conroy is a freelance writer residing in Australia.